


After All These Years

by Eireann



Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: Deathfic, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-22
Updated: 2012-06-22
Packaged: 2017-11-08 07:58:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/440965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eireann/pseuds/Eireann
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last survivor of the Enterprise crew returns for a final visit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After All These Years

**Author's Note:**

> Star Trek (plus all its intellectual property) is owned by Paramount. No infringement intended.
> 
> Beta'd by VesperRegina, to whom all due thanks.
> 
> Please note the content warning. If you are offended or upset by this kind of story please do not read any further.

After all these years, it still felt like home. 

Never as silent as this, though.  All through the five years of their mission, there had been _some_ sound.  Some indication that he wasn’t the only living creature on board.  Now there was only the infinitesimal background hum of life support that allowed visitors to walk through the corridors and peer into the rooms where so much history had been made.  The sound of his slow footsteps echoed strangely down the metal spaces, and at every turn he half expected to bump into a blue-suited figure going about their normal business, even though he knew that he wouldn’t.  Long gone.  All long gone.

The com links on the wall had a forlorn look.  They would be silent for ever now.  They had been disabled when the ship had been turned into the museum piece that it now was.  The buttons looked more worn than they'd used to, though.  People still liked to press them, maybe pretending that they themselves were one of the crew who had lived through so much, achieved so much, survived so much.  Imagining the exchanges that had taken place: the cries for help, the snapped reports, the questions, the orders, the audible struggles for survival in a world that had been so much more hostile than any of them could ever have imagined.  They'd gone out there with a hand extended in friendship and nearly had it torn off for good.  Still, by the end even the captain had learned his lesson, learned it hard out in the Expanse and never forgot it.  Never got over it, either. 

He walked onwards.  The running lights were at half-power.  If anyone happened to look at the vessel from outside they’d probably think that some late-night maintenance crew was on board.  As the ship’s onetime Security Officer he’d known perfectly well how to gain this extremely unauthorised access; any casual glance at the security console monitoring the ship’s environs would show that nothing was amiss.  If by any chance they didn’t buy it, then hell, they could come aboard and arrest him.  He knew what the inside of the brig looked like.  It had scared him then, almost as much as it had humiliated him, for all that he’d felt he deserved the door to be welded shut on him.  The memories had faded, somehow.  He struggled to recapture the sense of being alive enough to care. 

Habit is a strange thing.  He found himself outside his room.  Yet another of the information boards that now littered the ship announced who had slept here.  _Starfleet’s most famous aqua-phobic_.  _Hah_. 

He thumbed the control, half expecting that this too would have been disabled.  It hadn’t.  The door hissed open with the familiar sound, and he stepped into his quarters.  The oddest thing was that it seemed as if he’d only just left it.  The bedding hadn’t been stripped off, but made up neatly in place, just as if he’d done it himself.  His desk was orderly, with a few things left on it in their appointed places – even down to the PADD that he’d used for the duty rosters in the armoury.  Surely if he opened the fixtures his clothes would still be in their old places, immaculately tidy.  The clothes that he’d put in a suitcase all those years ago and long since outworn or discarded. 

A single photograph was pinned to the board.  If he’d put it on there he’d never have put it in _that_ position.  Apparently he hadn’t been the last officer to leave the ship after all.  He stared at the ghastly floral shirt that one of the men in the photograph was wearing, and then at the resigned expression of the other, against which a small smile was struggling.  Between them a young woman was giggling towards the camera.  Petite.  Young.  Beautiful.  Black-haired.

Alive.

He turned around and walked out of the room.  This really was the last time.  The last time he'd left there had been an air of unreality about it.  Now there wasn't.  He would leave the photograph, and anyone who cared to could look and wonder.  Old history. 

The turbo-lift was still working.

The armoury wasn’t a habit.  For five years it had been his life.  He was glad to see that it was still immaculate, even if most of what it contained was years out of date.  Weapons officers on the modern starships would laugh themselves into convulsions if offered what in those days had been the most modern technological armaments in Starfleet.  He passed a hand lightly over the casing of a torpedo, now fully disarmed for safety of course.  Too many of them had been shot into space bearing the body of a young man or woman who had paid with their life for their desire to explore the Universe.  _They will not grow old, as we who are left..._

Engineering.  He hesitated, seeing in his mind’s eye the empty, echoing room, the great warp engines standing silent and mourning.  There was nothing for him there, only pain.  He turned in the opposite direction.  There was only one more place that he wanted to visit.  The last place of all. 

Back to the turbo lift.  He took time to notice how well the plating had been mended.  You’d never know from looking how desperately damaged these corridors had been at one time.  How it had hardly been possible to move without seeing buckled metal, shorting cables, exposed circuits.  Blood.  In some places, bodies, and not always complete with their full set of limbs.  The air had been filled with smoke, fear, tension, rage, despair, the sizzle of sparks and the screams of the wounded and the dying, the curses of those feeling the decks shake underneath them as shot after shot pounded into the ship’s battered hull and flensed chunks out of her superstructure.  Emergency bulkheads had slammed into place as whole pieces of her had exploded into the freezing vacuum outside, hurling out anyone unfortunate enough to be between them like so many pieces of space debris, never even to be afforded the luxury of a torpedo casing to dignify their end.  Her hull polarisation destroyed, her warp capability gone, her weapons disabled, she had wallowed helplessly while the enemy curvetted around her, taking pot shots at will that within moments would find her life blood: the reactor.

Reprieve had seemed like a miracle.  A miracle at which somewhere the Devil must have laughed, since it led directly to a deeply moral man giving the orders for an act of outright moral and legal criminality that in every life but this one he would have scorned to contemplate.  The necessity of it had not been enough of an excuse.  He had lived with it, but he had never forgiven himself for it.  The mark of it had been in his face ever after, the mark of Cain.

The lift stopped.  The door opened.  The bridge was in front of him, silent and still, its viewscreen fixed on the starry void into which the ship would never fly again.  It seemed strange even now that the consoles were lifeless, the chairs untenanted.  His fingers brushed the back of the Captain’s chair gently as he passed, as though it were alive and he feared to wake it.

The tactical station.  _His_ tactical station.  He sat in the chair, feeling its familiarity as a deeply comforting thing.  His fingertips ran lightly over the controls, if not as lightly as they had done back then.  Behind his closed eyes the bridge was alive again.  The familiar voices warmed him.

“No, you can’t have more power for the armory, _Loo-tenant_.  And you’re comin’ to the movie night tonight if I have to haul your stiff Brit ass all the way.”

“Captain, I have examined the Vulcan database.  It suggests that there are dangerous atmospheric conditions on the planet.  _I_ suggest we proceed with caution.”

“Captain, I have an incoming message from Admiral Forrest.  Will you take it in your ready room?”

“Shuttle ready for docking.  Haul us aboard!”

“You will just have to be patient, Lieutenant.  I don’t keep you in sickbay just to enjoy your sparkling conversation, you know.”

“I couldn’t have done any of it without my crew.”

Weird.  That last voice had sounded so ...real.  He opened his eyes, puzzled.  At the other side of the situation room the Captain’s ready room was closed.  Perhaps guided tours were allowed to look in; they would doubtless want to see the place where a good man had been destroyed by events utterly beyond his control.  Maybe the intervening years would have erased some of the anguish from the place; maybe few of them would have any real understanding of the cost.  A lot of the darker, dirtier details had been quietly filed away as ‘classified’.  Starfleet, and Earth, had needed a hero.  It was unlikely that many people knew, or cared, that attaching such a label to a man damaged beyond healing was to inflict the last exquisite agony on him.  The needs of the many had still outweighed the needs of the one....

He stood up slowly.  His heart had begun to beat faster, an irregular thumping behind his ribs.  In the circumstances it would hardly be appropriate for him to fear death, but the voice sounded as if it had come from that closed room.  Which it couldn’t have done.  The door was built to ensure total privacy for command purposes.

_Illogical, Captain._

Perhaps the door seal was faulty.  Perhaps he was hearing things.  Perhaps leaving all his meds in the drawer of his hotel room the previous night had more consequences than he’d imagined.  At least, more surprising ones than he’d intended.  In his last conversation with Phlox the doctor had told him clearly and kindly what symptoms to look out for, and now he had them all.  This was why he had come here.  His time was very nearly over; the meds could do nothing more for him now.

Nevertheless, he was going to look.  If it was a ghost, he’d share a lot of its memories. _If I should walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; because I’m the hardest bloody son-of-a-bitch ever to walk through the bloody valley._ He still was, in some ways, even though the outside of him was failing rapidly.  They didn’t call him The Adder back in the Academy as a tribute to his mathematical skills.  A small British snake, shy and elusive but deadly when cornered.  He’d earned that nickname; he’d been proud of it.  Now the adder was about to shed its skin for the last time, and somehow it had mattered where that happened.  Not in the sterile, soulless surroundings of the hospital, nor in the empty spaces of his house where, for all he knew, the computer still displayed that last inbound message.  _Enterprise_ had called him home.

He might have got permission, if he’d asked, but it was bound to entail questions, and forms, and delays, and examinations, and all the rest of the wearisome trivialities he could no longer endure.  So he’d called on his old skills for the last time and here he was, alone on the bridge, with the last of his strength slowly slipping away and a ghost in the ready room.

The couple of metres across the deck seemed to have got longer in the last few minutes.  He leaned on the wall half way across, recovering his breath.  Then he made it to the ready room door and pressed the door control.  No point hitting the chime.  If his mind really was giving way along with everything else, he might hear someone giving him permission to enter.

The door hissed open. 

The empty room wasn’t empty.  A man sat at the desk.  The half-light gleamed on the four pips at his collar. 

Slowly, with an effort, he drew himself upright.  His hands went stiffly behind his back.  “Apologies for entering without permission, Sir.”

“Apology accepted.”  The voice was dryly humorous.  “Sit down before you fall down, Malcolm.”

He wasn’t as surprised as he ought to have been, despite the fact that that afternoon he’d walked past the memorial with its flame, and read the plaque with this man’s name on it.  He sat down and got his breath back again.  “I got the message this morning.”

“Yes.”  The green eyes travelled to the monitor with the Starfleet logo on it.  The message had come from Headquarters.  The news hadn’t been exactly a surprise.  Trip had been ill for some years.

“And T'Pol...?”

“Yes.”  There had always been the suggestion that the bond between them was unbreakable.  Apparently it had been.

“Well.  I’m the last, then.”  He looked at the bottle in front of the Captain.  Good quality bourbon.  And two glasses bearing the IDIC emblem.  A memento of the wedding.  One of them was full of amber liquid.  “You must have known I was coming.”

No answer to that.  He wasn’t sure what answer he’d expected, if any.  The soft gurgling of the bourbon filling the second glass was the loudest sound in the ship.

“You know this is a farewell toast, don’t you.”  The glance was level and piercing.  “Our time’s over, Malcolm.  You need a rest now, just like I did.  A good long rest.”

“If anyone was entitled to it you were, Sir,” he said gently.  “And yes, I feel that way too.  That’s why I’m here.”

After a long stare, the Captain pushed the second glass over to him.  “Remember we had the best, the day we launched?  This is even better.”

He was right.  It was excellent stuff.  He accepted a refill, so that none of it should be left.  It was even better than that purloined bottle that he and ... he and _Trip_ had shared during those momentous hours in Shuttlepod 1 as they waited for cold and oxygen starvation to kill them.  Funny, he had this predilection for dying in company, even though for all his life he’d been a lone wolf.  Good company, too, now that he came to think about it.

But the ready room wasn’t the place.  He didn’t feel comfortable here.  Too many bad memories, not enough good ones.

“Permission to ... return to my station, Captain,” he said quietly.  Better to go now, and as quickly as he could, while his legs could still manage it.  Somehow the old title slipped out, and it fitted, despite all the years.

“Permission granted, Lieutenant.”  Archer evidently had the same problem.  A shadowy smile came and went.

He stood up uncertainly.  The world wavered around him.  Fortunately there was a strong young shoulder to steady himself against.  It helped him through the door.  The two of them lurched up the couple of steps and on to the bridge, chuckling with what breath they had left.  At last he almost fell into his seat, supporting himself on the array in front of him as he watched his captain step towards the chair that had been such an improvement on the old one.  Archer sat back in it, running his hands caressingly across the control panels.  “Time for – another voyage, Malcolm.”

“Yes, Sir.”  He turned his head with what felt like an enormous effort to look briefly at the stars.  Soon they would lengthen into streaks of light and the two of them would be gone.  “Permission to say – it’s been a privilege, Jon.”

“The privilege was mine, Mal.”  Then there was nothing to say and nothing to listen to except his own breathing, slowly growing more difficult. Archer sat quietly, watching him with eyes that held all the old eagerness for adventure; before the Xindi, before everything that had saddened and spoiled the dream.

He didn’t feel any pain, just an enormous weariness.  Time to lay it all down; time to rest.  Time to follow his Captain on the last voyage of all and rejoin his comrades.  They were all waiting for him now.  Breathing was becoming burdensome, his head an insupportable weight.  He laid it down on the console, turning it so that he could still see Jon through a darkening haze of tears.  _Permission to die, Captain._

_Permission granted._

_  
_

The End.

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone's still with me by this point, all reviews received with gratitude!


End file.
